How to ACTUALLY Do Market Research for Your Business

In this video I’m going to show you 6 of my best strategies for effective market research that you can use today. These strategies will get you fast results, they're easy to do, and more importantly they work!

 

Right now, there are thousands of other people offering the same thing you are or that you want to offer. What’s going to make you stand out from the crowd is how well you understand your audience.

 

Because the business who understands their customer best, wins. 

 

It took me YEARS to learn that this was the missing piece to selling my products online.

 

Before that, I was just building products I thought people would want (like most people do) rather than KNOWING I was building something people wanted to pay for.

 

Market research is one of the most important, and profitable activities you can do and it doesn’t need to take you months to get great information to sell your products.

 

No matter what you’re selling in your business, you need to understand your audience if you want to sell anything.

 

Let’s dive in!

 

Step 1: Create a Document

 

So the very first thing that we want to do in terms of market research is to create a document.

 

Now this document is going to be your best friend, and I encourage you to store this somewhere where you will easily be able to access it.

 

I personally like to use a Google doc, but you can use a word doc or you can use the notes app on your phone. You can also do a spreadsheet.

 

I don't really care how you format it as long as you collect this information. That's the most important thing. So find whatever works for you.

 

Now, what I'd encourage you to do is to create three sections to this document or sheet that you create.

 

• Challenges, pains and frustrations
• Hopes, dreams and desires
• Obstacles, barriers and uncertainties

 

When you've created your three categories, what we want to do is use the next six strategies that I'm going to share with you to find great information and anything great that you find you're going to store into this document.

 

The goal with this document is to fill it with emotionally charged phrases.

 

When I was first starting to do this, I was just filling it with everything that I could find. Over time, I would revisit this document and realized that I filled it with a ton of useless information.

 

For example, if I was a fitness coach and I asked you, "What do you really want? What's your big goal when it comes to fitness?" And you said, "I want to lose weight."

 

 

 That is not an emotionally charged phrase.

 

When you can dig deep and find the real pain that someone has, or the real dream that they have, and they say something like:

 

"I just wish that I could lose weight so I could feel lighter and not have to have so much strain on my knees and my joints. And ultimately, I want to lose weight and be healthy so I can set an example for my kids that their dad isn't just some lazy, overweight person."

 

See the difference?

 

So once you have your document, let's dive into my six best strategies for market research.

 

Strategy #1: Amazon Book Reviews

 

Go to the Amazon search bar, click on "books" for the category and type in keywords related to your offer.

 

Pay attention to the titles of the books that come up in your search, because that's helpful when you're creating your own products.

 

Also be mindful of the amount of reviews the book has. If a book has a lot of reviews, it means that people bought it and are interested in it.

 

And I guarantee if they're selling well, the authors did their own market research to make that happen. Some people even have teams of people that help them with the market research, because it's so important.

 

When you're starting to create your own book, e-book or a digital product like an online course or membership site-you can get inspiration and ideas from what is already working in terms of books.

 

When you find some good books, we want to look for both positive and negative reviews.

 

It will take some digging to get through, but this is a great activity to do. Instead of scrolling on social media, you can just be digging through some Amazon book reviews and seeing what people loved about the book, or what people didn't like about the book, or what they wish was included in it.

 

And a lot of times they're going to share their personal experience by saying, "I'm dealing with this. And this is what I was really hoping to get from this book." That's all great research that you can take and add to your document.

 

So when you find these emotionally charged phrases where you read it and feel like, "Wow, I can't believe that person just shared that", you can copy it and paste it directly into your document.

 

Strategy #2: YouTube Comments

 

What we want to do here is find creators that are doing something similar to you.

 

They're in the same niche. Maybe they've built a lot more of an audience - that's usually a good person to go for.

 

The goal is to look for conversational comments.

 

A lot of times when you follow someone really big, like Alex Hormozi, if you go through his comments, a lot of people will say things like, "Oh, this is great, I love you, Alex."...

 

There's nothing really there.

 

 

Again, this is going to take a bit of digging just like Amazon book reviews.

 

But every now and then you'll find a creator who maybe isn't as big as Alex Hormozi or another influencer in your space, but their comments are gold.

 

They're going back and forth. People are sharing their actual story, their situation, how this content resonates with them or maybe doesn't resonate with them.

 

All of that is amazing market research that you can find and add to your document.

 

So as you're digging through YouTube comments, again, add emotionally charged phrases to your document in the correct category.

 

Strategy #3: Facebook Groups

 

What we want to do here is find groups that your target market would be hanging out in, and then join them.

 

Once you're inside the group, use the search icon in the top right corner of the group page and type in words like; "struggle" or "challenge".

 

What Facebook will do is highlight those keywords and dig through every single post that has ever been put into this Facebook group.

 

Then, what you want to do is find what your audience is talking about related to the topic that you're interested in/interested in building a product around.

 

Again, as you're reading through, add emotionally charged phrases to your document in the correct category.

 

Strategy #4: Online Forums

 

Type in a question that your audience would type into Google and then just add Reddit or Quora.

 

Reddit and Quora are two of the biggest forums on the internet - they have topics related to literally anything that you can think about. These are real questions that people are asking and often experts who answer the questions as well.

 

Again, we're finding those conversational pieces related to whatever you typed into Reddit or Quora. Pay attention to the conversations that people are having related to your product and once again, add emotionally charged phrases to your document.

 

Strategy #5: Run a Survey

 

This is great if you have access to a large group of your target audience.

 

Oftentimes when I'm working with private clients, they don't have a lot of time to dig through and sift through information - but they do have connections and access to a big audience. That's where it makes sense to run a survey.

 

If you're brand new - you're just getting started and you don't really have access to any kind of audience like that, then maybe running a survey isn't the best option at this time.

 

Even if you have a small email list of a couple hundred people, you can still run a survey and get some awesome information.

 

The way that you would create this survey is by asking 3 to 5 questions:

 

A question related to challenges, pains, and frustrations could be; "What is your biggest challenge or frustration related to (x)?"

 

A question related to hopes, dreams and desires could be; "What is your biggest hope, dream or desire when it comes to (x)?"

 

Now, I'm sure you've taken a survey with 50 questions on it, and it's taken you 15 to 20 minutes plus to run through it. Unless you really like the person and really want to help them out, you're probably not going to want to take that survey.

 

 

We want to keep our survey short by having it be about 3 to 5 questions. Make it easy to fill out while still providing that great information.

 

Ideally you should keep your survey mostly bullet points, but keep one free right answer at the end. I usually like to have the free right be about obstacles, barriers and uncertainties.

 

And to turn that into a question, just ask, "What is your biggest obstacle, barrier or uncertainty you have related to (x)?"

 

The free right answers often give you the juiciest information, because it's coming straight from the person in their own words. That's what we really want.

 

To build out your form. I'd recommend using a free tool like Jotform or Google Forms.

 

As you get your survey answers in, remember to add emotionally charged phrases to your document in the respective category.

 

Strategy #6: Live Conversations

 

Live conversations are by far the most powerful form of market research. This is because when you sit down with your audience you can ask questions and dig deep as much as possible.

 

If you're a fitness coach helping people get into amazing shape and you're doing your market research, you can sit down with people and ask them,

"What is your biggest challenge related to getting in the optimal level of shape that you want?"

And if they say,

"You know, I just I want to lose weight."

You can say,

"Okay, why is losing weight so important to you?", "What is it about losing weight that would really help you and transform your life?"

 

It's those why questions.

 

If you've seen the movie Shrek where they say, "Ogres have layers." 

Well, people do too.

 

And that's what we're doing here. Every time we ask "Why?" or "How come?", we're peeling back the layers to this person until we get down to the part that makes us cry.

 

Obviously, it's not about hurting people or making them cry. It's about getting down to what's really going on here. What's the real motive? Why do they want to lose weight so bad?

 

Because nobody just wants a result. They don't want to just build a business. They don't want to just lose weight or just know how to bake and make great food. There's always a deep driving reason as to why they want that, and that's the goal that we want to find.

 

Live conversations are amazing because you have the luxury of digging deep, assuming that they're comfortable enough to do that with you.

 

On these live calls, you're not selling anything. If someone's really interested in working with you, you can book a secondary call where you could talk about working together.

 

So as you promote this to people you can say, "Hey, I'm doing market research for a program I want to make, I just want to ask some questions. It would be really short, maybe about 15 to 20 minutes. Is that okay?"

 

And I would blatantly tell them, "There's nothing to sell you here, but if you are interested in working with me and it feels like a good fit - we can always book another call." 

 

When you sit down on the call, structure it around the three categories:

 

• "What's your biggest challenge, frustration, or pain related to (x)?"
• "What's your biggest hope, dream or desire related to (x)?"
• "And what do you think is the biggest barrier, obstacle or uncertainty that you have that's getting in the way of you achieving that?"

 

So you want to find out where are they at, where they want to be, and what's getting in the way of them getting from point A to point B.

 

And FOR THE LAST TIME, remember to add those emotionally charged phrases to your document in the correct category.

 

If you actually use these strategies, within a week or less you will have an insane amount of gold.

 

So when you write emails, create your website, create digital products, write a book or create a sales page - you can always fall back on this document of pure gold that is straight from your audience. This can be used to communicate with that audience in terms of your emails, sales copy and products.

 

You're going to know that you're building things that people genuinely care about. Find the demand and then supply that demand.

 

Conclusion

 

Now, whether you're just starting out or you've been doing this for a while, once you've really done good market research like this, I'd encourage you to go back to your website and your overall online presence and brand. Make sure that everything is connecting to what your audience is saying, because now you really know what they want.

 

And to help you best use all of this information that you've collected, you should check out this article where I show you how to build a profitable website.

 

Take what we learned here. Get out there. Make something happen. I will see you in the next one.